Negotiating Notting Hill

Each year after Notting Hill Carnival there is debate in media columns and talk back radio about whether the Carnival has outgrown its current site. ‘The streets of gentrifying Notting Hill can no longer accommodate Europe’s largest street party’, is one argument. ‘The Caribbean community has moved on and so should the carnival’ is another. On reflection, there are perhaps two deep seated fears being presented in these arguments: first, fear of the crowd, its sheer size and unpredictability; second, the fear of the stranger and his/her ambiguity.

The popular belief is that crowds are volatile and equal trouble. Such impressions have ultimately led to crowd control tactics such as ‘kettling’. However, psychologists at St Andrews University, researching how people behave at demonstrations, large sporting or music events have found that there is wisdom embedded in crowds which nearly always act in highly rational ways, and are more likely to cooperate than panic in an emergency. The findings pointed to an ‘identity shift’ which drives people in a crowd to act in the best interests of themselves and those around them. Decades earlier, Elias Canetti wrote of similar sensations when he described the individual’s sense of transcendence when subsumed into a crowd, now free of the burden of distance from others.

Trying to make my way up Ladbroke Grove during Carnival it is hard to feel a sense of transcendence. There is at first a sense only of discomfort. There is a feeling of suffocation as my 5’ 2” frame is squeezed on all sides, pulled back, loses sight of my partner, and becomes surrounded by strangers.

According to Canetti, ‘there is nothing that man (sic) fears more than the touch of the unknown. (…) It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched’. Not just any crowd though. A crowd in which we lose our fear of being touched by the unknown is a crowd that is already dense with familiarity. This is a closed crowd; a crowd that sets its boundaries and desires permanence at the expense of disorderly growth.

The open crowd, a Notting Hill crowd, is another experience altogether. It is potentially limitless and exists so long as it grows, pulling people, barbeque smoke and sequins into its wake as it roils its way through the neighbourhood, disintegrating as quickly as it began when it reaches sunset.

Perhaps then the tensions that infiltrate Notting Hill Carnival are not generated in the diversity of people per se, but in the dynamics of closed and open crowds, order and spontaneity. Their meeting can be fraught as incursion into each other’s territory is unwittingly made. The closed crowd may not even appear on the streets. Its adherents appear silent, invisible in cultural frameworks dominated by established social hierarchies (for example, men, capital, Englishness). Its boundaries are of course always contested (for example, by women, youth, or other cultural frames of reference) and sometimes breached by the open crowd. But the open crowd’s impermanent nature may not provide any lasting infrastructure on which to build equality and can block a thoroughfare as easily as any gated community.

On a daily basis then we must negotiate with either crowd, sometimes going with the flow, sometimes stepping to the side to avoid collision; watching, always watching. These negotiations are inflected by personal dispositions of, as Bauman puts it, mixophilia and mixophobia: the love of the city and all its crowds, and its inverse proposition, the fear of the city with all its strangers.

Adding to our repertoire of skills that as individuals we deploy to navigate the city, we find a means to move. Holding hands, forming a human chain, and like water, sliding between the cracks of space that mysteriously open up once some unseen pressure of presence is applied to the crowd, we make our way up Ladbroke Grove.

Notting Hill Carnival, 24-25 August 2008

The Carnival: ... that which can't be held, can't be repressed, can't be organised into neatness. The fear of politicians everywhere: the crowd in the street; the uncontrolled, uncontrollable display; the random, unpredictable event that punctuates the facade of normality, the facade of power (A. Jach,1999, The Layers of the City, Sydney: Hodder Headline, p 91).

I used to think that Sydney’s Mardi Gras was the pinnacle of parties … at least 12 hours of dance-fuelled hedonism culminating in the pleasure of sliding between thousands of smooth torsos at 9 a.m. in the morning, staggering outside to see the sun already up and doing its worst to make you look like a hag now that the eyeliner has washed down the face to mingle with the glitter and the sweaty hair that has fallen out of the ‘do’ it took hours and half a can of spray to create.

But I have to reassess …

Dingo Baby seemed especially keen that I come with him to Notting Hill Carnival and being up for anything remotely resembling the reoccupation of public space by the public I thought it sounded like a good idea. Notting Hill is not far from my place and the impending excitement was palpable in the street the night before. Diversion signs and barricades had been going up for well over a week beforehand. And those barricades were not just the usual crowd control metal gates but, as it turned out, the entire boarding up of shops and houses along the main parade route and all the way up Portobello Road. This was clearly going to be no ordinary party.

Notting Hill Carnival is overwhelmingly massive. It is noisy, messy, dirty, chaotic and sex on two dozen sound systems. It is a street party for two million people over two days. The entire suburb becomes a dance floor. There is a parade that starts around 12pm each day which is basically made up of trucks with sound systems on them with any number of dancers, some in costume, some just following on behind. It takes all day and into the evening for the floats to get around the route. Then dotted around the suburb are sound systems which are basically a DJ dwarfed by stacks of speakers: ranging from the highly professional, commercial outfits such as the darlings of the Ibiza set, Sancho Panza, and Good Times with the legendary Norman Jay, MBE, to the local DJ who seemed to have found the money to get together a few mates to rig speakers up outside his block of council flats. It is surround sound music at full decibels cranking out until 7pm. And once the music is shut down you can wander over to the parade route, find a truck you like and join in there till late in the evening.

There is reggae, there is house and all its derivatives, there is trance, techno and drum and bass. There are steel bands and most importantly, there is soca music and if you’re blessed with a big arse you can wind it for all it’s worth with thousands of other beautiful women similarly blessed with big arses. 

By the end of the day you will be covered in sweat, glitter, chocolate, someone’s cocktail and/or mug of beer, and a layer of smoke from joints and jerk chicken being BBQ’d on the thousands of improvised stoves in every second front yard that has become a mini-store for the weekend also selling cold drinks and the use of their toilet from £1 to £5 depending on how far you are from an official one. I’m not sure how many chickens, pigs and salted fish gave their lives for the weekend but I’m sure they think it’s worth it.

It does get edgy when the sun starts to set. Everyone is drinking and smoking something, even your grandmother. As we started walking home on the second evening down Portobello Road, a group of young men ran past, one or two with faces covered by keffiyeh. Moments later a group of police also ran past and Dingo Baby and I made it home just before the fighting took off. Buses from south-west London were stopped before they could unload any more young men to do battle with each other.

I’m wondering if we’d be much better off if all young men were given The Dangerous Book for Boys, or better still were made to dance all day behind my favourite float oozing soca and the mantra ‘no knives, just chocolate’.

Instead there is the constant buzz of the ‘eye in the sky’ police helicopter, and homes and offices are co-opted for use as CCTV stations manned by police with binoculars and laptops. Being spied on is not a comfortable experience although I’m glad there is a strong police presence on the ground, most importantly for silently and unobtrusively directing people into other routes when one street becomes too crowded. Many seemed to be having a good time of it as well and in a crowd of two million people I don’t think 330 arrests is too bad; up on last year but violence was down.

The ‘criminal’ factor is given as one reason why the Carnival should be shut down or moved to somewhere like Hyde Park where it can be suitably controlled, patrolled and ordered. For our safety, for the safety of residents, and fair enough, I’m sure it’s a pain to board your shop or home up for a few days a year and come back to find people have pee’d against your fence. But I’d probably argue that it is dereliction of cultural norms and borders that is even more threatening and discomforting for the Carnival’s opponents. Given its size and what it represents, a celebration of Afro-Caribbean culture, it is inevitably going to be a battle ground of class, culture and gender; between mixo-phobs and mixo-phils (thank you Zygmunt Bauman); between the newly gentrified set from the movie of the same name, and the estates and tower blocks that somehow never made it into the film; between release and restraint, order and chaos.

The different crowd at each sound system is a demarcation of the city: it is mostly white and middle class arm waving in front of Sancho Panza’s DJs but get closer to the floats, the frenetic heart of the Carnival, and it’s a sea of Afro-Carribean. Kilt wearing Thais dancing to reggae music and selling jerk chicken are going to confuse anyone’s sense of order as may 80 year olds who are still dancing to Drum and Bass, and heaven forbid in this god-fearing Christian civilisation where they still give out the Bible on Desert Island Discs as one of the books you have to take (BBC Radio Four), loads of flesh, cleavage and the strong whiff of sex that lingers in the lyrics of the music and on many bodies. And yet despite all this, on Portobello Road two days later the straighteners had been through and it was business as usual, spic and span. So to those who find it all too much, I beseech you, for the greater good, let there be a few days of discomfort, let there be disorder, let there be noise, let there be release, let there be carnival. It will all return to normal soon enough.